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Nobody wants to re-invent the wheel, but nor would anybody use wooden cart wheels to transport the space shuttle to the launch pad. Human development has always relied upon building upon past advances and the hallmark of originality is understanding the context in which an existing tool or concept works and effectively adapting theconcepts to new contexts. This talk will discuss the rise of digitised newspaper collections and how to build upon so-called traditional methods of close-reading, categorisation, and manual visualisation in order to build a suite of research tools that best serve the particular context of the corpus and research questions. Particular attention will be given to the value of linking existing analytical tools into new methodologies and the development of bespoke software to solve project-specific problems.

A talk given as part of Digital Newspaper Month, in conjunction with Victoria University of Wellington, at the National Library of New Zealand, 3 May 2018.The newspaper of the nineteenth century was a strange creature. Over a handful of pages, it reported the latest local gossip, expounded on national politics, informed of international triumphs and disasters, and related whimsical tales of the fantastic and macabre. Mid-century readers could truthfully claim that they had the world at their fingertips. The world imagined on these pages, however, was one ever-so-slightly out of sync with reality.This talk will explore the pages of the nineteenth-century press and how scissors, paste and a bit of creative timekeeping produced a remarkably interconnected paper world.

We are all familiar with the ideal newspaper—the headlines, datelines, and by-lines, the photos, the captions, and the ads. But can we step away from this image and re-imagine the newspaper as a basket of words, or of ideas, curated and arranged in different ways for different ends? This paper will discuss methods for cataloguing and re-conceptualising the content of nineteenth-century newspapers through different data visualisations and how to leverage our widening access to digital newspaper transcriptions to understand the newspaper as a both a unified genre and diverse collection of independent publications.

From their earliest incarnations in the seventeenth-century, through their Georgian expansion into provincial and colonial markets and culminating in their late-Victorian transformation into New Journalism, British newspapers have relied upon scissors-and-paste journalism to meet consumer demands for the latest political intelligence and diverting content. Although this practice, wherein one newspaper extracted or wholly duplicated content from another, is well known to scholars of the periodical press, in-depth analysis of the process is hindered by the lack of formal records relating to the reprinting process. Although anecdotes abound, attributions were rarely and inconsistently given and, with no legal requirement to recompense the original author, formal records of where material was obtained were unnecessary. Even if they had existed, the number of titles that relied upon reprinted material makes systematic analysis impossible; for many periodicals, only a few issues, let alone business records, survive. However, mass digitisation of these periodicals, in both photographic and machine-readable form, offers historians a new opportunity to rediscover the mechanics of nineteenth-century reprinting. By undertaking multi-modal and multi-scalar analyses of digitised periodicals, we can begin to reconstruct the precise journeys these texts took from their first appearance to their multiple ends. Before the advent of the telegraph, individual texts were disseminated manually, through postal and private correspondence routes, over sea and land. This allowed for the relatively slow spread of texts across communication networks, as well their adaptation, truncation and expansion various stages. In a manner similar to modern internet memes, blogs and online news content, texts underwent evolutionary changes with each reprinting. These could be minute, such as the correction of spelling errors or the application of house style, or significant, through selective reordering and truncation to alter the overall meaning of the text. While identifying meme families, or collections of related texts, can help us understand what made particularly texts popular, or viral, it is only by tracing the specific trajectories and pathways of these texts that the causes and consequences of evolutionary changes can be understood. Doing so requires us to approach these texts on multiple scales. First, by mining extremely large corpora, derived from several independent collections, we are able to identify a statistically sufficient portion of the historical network. Then, by carefully analysing the chronology and discrepancies between these reprints, hypotheses regarding institutional and industry standards can be posited and tested against the wider corpus. These efforts can be further buttressed by utilising manual transcriptions found in the personal archives of researchers using historical newspapers, such as the Scissors and Paste Database (www.scissorsandpaste.net). These transcriptions, far more accurate than the majority of datasets derived from optical character recognition, greatly improve the mining of the corpora, yielding a more complete initial network to analyse, as well as offset the skewing effect of the ‘offline penumbra’. This poster will explore the possibilities of large-scale reprint identification within and across digitised collections using a combination of Lou Bloomfield’s Copyfind and project-specific code to identify matches between individual articles or full pages of texts in both manual (perfect) and OCR (messy) transcriptions. Exemplar collections include the British Library's 19th-Century Newspapers digital collection and planned expansions into the digital collections of the National Library of Wales (Welsh Newspaper Online) and of Australia (Trove). The poster will also demonstrate the means by which reprint branching can be mapped using chronology and character clustering and the relative precision of manual and computer-aided techniques. Finally, it will explore the nature of multi-scalar analysis and how we might best reintegrate ‘boutique’ periodical research, such as the author’s Scissors and Paste Database, into large-scale text-mining projects.

This article has now appeared in: Beals, M. H. “The Role of the Sydney Gazette in the Creation of Australia in the Scottish Public Sphere.” In Historical Networks in the Book Trade, edited by Catherine Feely and John Hinks, 148–70. The History of the Book. Basingstoke: Routledge, 2016. Because of the wealth of quantitative information and editorial opinion they provide, those researching British migration have often turned to newspapers and other periodicals; the use of shipping notices, advertisements, original reportage and editorial commentaries has provided historians with contemporary descriptions of changes in population composition, whether by immigration, natural growth, increased mortality or out-migration. Although requiring corroboration, these sources provide excellent indications of when changes occurred and when these became worthy of comment. However, the precise nature of these commentaries, the mechanics of their creation, transmission and evolution, remains unclear. While recent work in newspaper and media history have begun to trace information networks present in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the lines of communication in the early empire remain unclear. Throughout the Georgian period, newspapers cited, borrowed and blatantly stole editorial content from other British and colonial papers. The question remains, however, whether this source material was manipulated by local editors to suit local prejudices or whether an uncritical inclusion of reprints shaped or utterly transformed local opinion. Since its official founding in 1787, the British colony of New South Wales had been home to a wide range of British immigrants including convicted prisoners, government and military personal, religious missionaries and free settlers. Nonetheless, this complex view of migration and settlement in Australia was not always appreciated by those who resided in sending communities within Britain. Rumours mixed with half-record fact to create an eclectic and fluctuating public conversation of Antipodean prospects. In recent years, historians have begun to rewrite imperial histories to better account for the fluctuating and multi-layered nature of identity within Britain’s “white” colonies, encompassing class, faith, nationality and provincial status. Yet, there remains a fundamental disconnect between the study of public spheres within the colonies themselves and that of Britain. While the study of individual newspaper titles has a long history and imperial historians have now begun to compare perceptions of identity and empire between disparate regions, there has yet to be a close study of the tangible connections between metropolitan, provincial and colonial public spheres. This implies that the two did not intersect or that the spread of identity was mono-directional in nature. This article therefore traces the editorial history of the printed conversations and proclamations found in British and Australian newspapers between 1803 and 1842, the years in which the Sydney Gazette, Australia’s most commonly cited periodical, was in operation. By examining Australia’s public portrayal of immigration, settlement and the demographic composition of New South Wales and by tracing these descriptions through the reprints, abridgements and commentaries of British newspapers, this article compares and contrasts public notions of identity and nationalism within Australia with those who remained or had returned to Great Britain. From this, this article demonstrates the extent to which the Sydney Gazette acted as the gatekeeper and envoy of Australian identity in the early nineteenth century.

A Collection of Seminar Worksheets for "The Press and American Society, 1836-1922", a Third-Year History Module at Sheffield Hallam University (2014). These worksheets were written to reinforce and clarify verbal instructions and face-to-face support given during weekly, two-hour computer seminars. They may, therefore, reference material delivered in weekly lectures, or the required reading, and should not be reused in other modules without revision. Likewise, the aim of this module was to introduce students to the concept of computer-aided analysis without overwhelming them with technical detail or cumbersome commercial software. Therefore, the techniques below have been simplified and should not be taken as complete representations of the power or nuance of these methodologies.

This article explores changes to passage advertising in the Scottish Borders, 1800-1830 in relation to rising rates of immigration to North America and, later, Australasia.